Financial elites and their Occupiers share a belief in big government

From City Journal:

The titans of Wall Street and the leaders of Occupy Wall Street have much more in common than is generally assumed. The lords of finance deal in abstraction; leaving the homeless and hangers-on aside, Zuccotti Park is overstocked with media and public-relations professionals, experts at another kind of abstraction. And both are backers of big government. The main difference between them is that the Wall Streeters understand that fact. The Zuccotti Parkers, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been slower to figure out that they and their ostensible opponents are actually on the same side of the big-versus-small-government question.

Since 2008—the first year since 1980 that the so-called FIRE industries (finance, insurance, and real estate) contributed more money to Democrats than Republicans, according to opensecrets.org—financial services has hitched its cart to big government. No wonder, then, that as financial journalist Charles Gasparino notes, some of the biggest names on Wall Street have kind words for the occupiers.

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“If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.” —James Madison (1792)